Being a little slow these days, I missed Chris Berg's gem of free thinking, in Schools should be free to teach what they want.It shows the same kind of spirit as Paul Sheehan, who is clearly free to scribble what he wants, and does in PM's obsession rolls on, taking hospitals in the wrong direction.
Sheehan manages within three pars to conjure up a vast army of health bureaucrats centred in Canberra. 10,000 strong! Enough to unify the three kingdoms of China. And instead of alphabet soup, this week the favourite word is debacle - here a debacle, there a debacle. Where would the commentariat columnists be without a disaster, and costly debacles?
You'd swear Australia is grinding to a halt as the apocalypse approaches - why we're doing it tougher than Chile and Haiti put together, with this ongoing jolting from a series of costly earthquake debacles. The green energy revolution lies in ruins, and now the hospital revolution is a costly debacle, before it even begins, as Canberra bureaucrats storm the system, and lay waste to hapless doctors.
Why last I heard Australia's health system was somewhere below the ones run by tinpot African dictators! And Sheehan will confirm that in a trice:
Despite this bureaucratic burden, Australia still has one of the best health and hospital systems in the world, ranking high in performance measures among members of the OECD.
Que. Say what? WTF? Ah well, one of my favourite quotes belongs to Walt Whitman.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
There's nothing like debacles and disasters that turn out not to be so bad after all. Kinda lifts the spirits.
Which shouldn't of course stop me from denouncing Chairman Rudd for his nonsensical threats and his hypocrisy and his contradictions and the paper castles of his various revolutions and his grand promises and his trust-me politics, and his rhetorical over-stretch which masquerades once again for an Orwellian brave new world.
Phew, that felt good. Nothing like a venting of the spleen to relieve the built up juices in the liver of a crusty curmudgeon on a grumpy Monday.
But back to Berg, who has a much more splendid idea. In a bid to improve the Chairman Rudd Gillard costly education debacle, and the thousands of new bureaucrats required to manage the education system - which experts estimate by 2012 will result in Canberra tripling its population before becoming the first victim of the end of the Mayan calendar - Berg proposes an excellent solution:
If some parents wanted their children to be taught that capitalism has brought misery and oppression and darkness, they could choose that. If other parents wanted their children to understand how market relationships lead to mutual gain, and free trade alleviates poverty, they could choose that too.
Until the government gives control of the curriculum back to schools, parents and students will always be somewhat unsatisfied with what Australian children are taught.
Indeed. Let educational anarchy and chaos reign supreme. If creationists want to teach creationism, let them. If scientologists want to run schools to make sure that their kids are taught in a healthy Xenu and volcano free environment, who's to argue. If Islamics want to make sure that their kids learn the basics of jihad, they shouldn't feel constrained by petty-minded secularists. If the Brethren want to make sure their flock dress like remnants of a nineteenth century mid-western US village, where's the harm? If Catholics want to learn about the spiritual benefits of cannibalism - nothing like a snack of blood and flesh in communion, beats the school tuckshop - they can go at it as hard as they like.
Oh wait, they already do, and they're funded by the Australian taxpayer.
Never mind, it always seemed to me that we could improve the study of science by introducing mythologies. Oh wait, it seems Berg has a problem with that:
The science curriculum's insistence that science should be taught as a cultural endeavour - with Asian and Aboriginal perspectives such as the Dreamtime - seems more like cultural studies. Worthy in their own right perhaps, but teaching myths in science class is a bit odd.
And its emphasis on ''the human responsibility to contribute to sustainability'' seems just a touch ideologically loaded.
Never mind, just give the students what the parents want. Will you sign my petition to have the scientific insights of Lord of the Rings included in the science curriculum, because that's what we want in this house! And it's our right as libertarians to demand it, just as it's our choice to choose choice!
At the very least, the study of history, which can be subject to many more interpretations than mathematics, could be left to the discretion of schools. After all, most of the bitterness over the history wars was about ideological control over the curriculum.
Sheesh, Chris, all the teachers in schools are lefties. Handing over the curriculum to them would just be inviting the Marxists to take over.
Well it gave me the grand idea that it was about time I opened a school dedicated to sensible historical interpretations of the past. Like:
The white Australia policy wasn't racist, it was more a designer motif, like an all white room in a Swedish Ikea display home.
Hitler was a much misunderstood man. Perhaps David Irving can do a guest lecture.
The Japanese only invaded China to free Asia from western imperial dominance.
The Inquisition was a generous attempt by the church to save souls from hell.
The end times are around the corner, so let's nuke Iran.
Sorry, don't know where that one came from, but it seems like a good idea, and could be made to fit into any decent history curriculum.
Now why not devise your own history curriculum and insist it be taught at your school today? Why not make an appointment with your child's history teacher right this minute? And in the process tear off the black armband he or she is wearing, and offer your own St. Christopher Pyne medal for their spiritual guidance.
What is most touching in both Berg and Sheehan is the notion that if you return everything to a grass roots level, away from evil Canberra, everything will be alright. The demon of centralisation drives everyone into a frenzy, even if, as Franz Kafka - an impeccable bureaucrat dreaming of nightmare bureaucracies persecuting Joseph K - knows that events in Peking are sometimes a little hard to connect to the hinterland:
Our land is so huge, that no fairy tale can adequately deal with its size. Heaven hardly covers it all. And Peking is only a point, the imperial palace only a tiny dot. It’s true that, by contrast, throughout all the different levels of the world the emperor, as emperor, is great. But the living emperor, a man like us, lies on a peaceful bed, just as we do. It is, no doubt, of ample proportions, but it could be merely narrow and short. Like us, he sometime stretches out his limbs and, if he is very tired, yawns with his delicately delineated mouth. But how are we to know about that thousands of miles to the south, where we almost border on the Tibetan highlands? Besides, any report which came, even if it reached us, would get there much too late and would be long out of date. (The Great Wall of China).
These days China is in the Tibetan highlands, and we have the intertubes and modern media to provide more up to date news on the emperor in his bed or outside his coy little church doing a church stopper, but still the provinces are recalcitrant and resist and develop their own perverse idiosyncrasies, even as Canberra tries to herd the cats.
But Sheehan dreams the pastoral idyll of autonomous hospital boards, and village green community based administration. Which should work tremendously well with my local hospital, the Royal Prince Alfred, which has a staff of over 4,000 people, bigger than many a country town (as featured on television!)
And it should easily fix the dilemma of the aggregation of expertise and extremely expensive equipment in this kind of teaching hospital, as opposed to the need of every country town to have their very own computerised axial tomography scanner and magnetic resonance imaging machine. Not to mention a facility for liver transplants open heart surgery and a decent cyclotron. No, there's no need to think about the allocation and most effective use of extremely expensive resources while the states go the biff amongst themselves.
I remember talking to one of Australia's leading hospital administrators about the business of bringing hospitals online, and he was the one who used the term herding cats. Because truth to tell, I've never yet met a doctor who wants to be herded or has an interest in herding. As perverse and irascible a group of recalcitrant individuals as might be imagined. And nothing wrong with that. Just don't try to get them organised to take off their socks in unison or do business online.
Meanwhile, Chris Berg is terribly worried about the fate of the students at Gochin Jiny Jirra school in the NT, with 25 students, knowing that Chairman Rudd is likely to drop in any day and give them a personal exam and then roundly denounce them all as failures for not meeting the standards of his national curriculum. Oh wait, they do that anyway, and even without benefit of Chairman Rudd's personal attendance. Still, it's a dream, that village green dream:
The federal government seems to believe a national curriculum will be inherently better than state curriculums. But ''national'' is not a synonym for ''awesome''.
If we really wanted a revolution in education, we'd give schools flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the needs and profile of their student body.
Well I'm not quite sure about the subtle distinction between a state city-based bureaucrat organising a curriculum for a school out back of Bourke, and a federal city-based bureaucrat organising one. Unless of course you think the NSW state Labor government is "awesome".
You know, I'm beginning to think what this country needs is a Pol Pot. A much misunderstood man, he was clearly on to something when he arranged for intellectuals and commentariat columnists to be sent out into the countryside, to earn their living as honest peasants, at one with the earth and the village green and a decent day's toil in the fields.
Because usually I find that city based folk who blather on about the right to independence of country folk (a) have never lived in the bush and (b) have no idea of the benefits of agrarian socialism.
Great, another subject area for my new history curriculum. Now all I need is a school dumb enough, with teachers silly and inexperienced enough, to think the answer is to devise a curriculum according to the whims and desires of parents and students.
First up? The films of Hollywood, consisting of five masterpieces a day, with popcorn and choc top for lunch, until they wilt and begin to demand a little fibre in their diet, not to mention anything but Bruce Willis up on the screen ...
There, I think that sock's boiled.
Somewhere in the nation there's no doubt a sensible discussion of the issues involving the federation, and commonwealth v state, and education and health, and their assorted revolutions going down amongst sensible thinkers, but not on these pages. Because we rely on commentariat columnists as the source for our curricula. Doomed.
Dorothy, do you ever dredge through the IPA website, it's all about this sort of crapola! And please don't get me going about Libertarians...
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